In recent years there has been no shortage of issues that should make most people think about before they go online without protection. Everything from data retrieval from US intelligence services , the Swedish authorities’ ability to monitor Norwegian Internet traffic, and not least future data retention guidelines, which are temporarily suspended , has really focused on how vulnerable our privacy has been on the Internet.
As a consequence of the authorities’ steady pressure for increased and more comprehensive monitoring, a type of service that offers you a more private and secure traffic on the internet has now exploded in popularity.
We’re talking about VPN services, and we’ve tested them.
Find out which VPN provider VPN VG security analyst and grass journalist, Einar Otto Stangvik, would have chosen further down the case!
Secures and anonymizes you
A VPN, a “virtual private network”, is a service that allows you to drive all your internet traffic through a secure virtual tunnel. The tunnel is, in practice, a server that is completely different from where you live and that strangers, intelligence services, your own state or employer for that matter will not be able to trace your network communication back to you.
As an example, we can say you want anonymous access to a website in Denmark. Then you connect your computer to the VPN provider’s Swedish server, which, in turn, retrieves the webpage from Denmark on your behalf and forwards to you. This way, the Danish website only tells you that someone has visited it from Sweden, and no one can see that you are in Norway and surf with a Norwegian IP address that has actually read it. All of this happens in the background, without notice anything else – except that things may take longer, since content is sent through multiple paragraphs.
Once you have installed a VPN and your network provider logs which sites, and hence, IP addresses you communicate with, even your network provider will only see data traffic between you and the VPN provider. This makes it impossible for them to know which websites you have visited using these logs.
However, traffic logs that are not stored by the ISP, but with the VPN provider, constitute a potential security risk as they may always be offset by data interruptions, police battles or other. Their traffic logs can make it possible to track which webpages you have visited back to you, but only if they actually log this in the first place. We require that the various VPN providers included in our test declare on their websites that they do not store traffic logs whatsoever. That the provider claims logless means we are better than they do not, but be aware that someone is lying so it flows from them just to get your money.
Unlocks US Streaming Services
Not only can a VPN service be a good assurance against unauthorized insights into your online tasks. Some internet services, such as online TV and streaming services, also have limitations in where their users can access the content from – so-called geo-blocking. This means that if you are using a VPN service that makes it look like you are browsing the United States, you may lose access to NRK’s Web TV, but could, among other things, unlock access to a much larger selection of movies on Netflix than we Norwegians today are struggling with.
According to finder.com , for example, we Norwegians only have access to about 30 percent of all TV shows, and 39 percent of all movies that the cowboy over the pond has via its American Netflix.
Not sure why it pays to be anonymous online?
Read our complete guide to how to hide easily online »
Which VPN service should you choose?
Without wondering why a VPN service is something that can be well worth the investment, we jump straight on to another important question. In the myriad of VPN services offered, which should you choose?
VPN services offer different speeds and security solutions at different prices. Some VPN services allow you to connect to hundreds of servers in Norway and abroad, while others only offer a handful of servers within a country’s borders.
Which VPN service you should choose depends on whether you set speed, security or price in the driver’s seat, and whether you want to access geoblocated content or an e-mail. Accordingly, if you want to see American Netflix, you must select a VPN provider that offers US servers located in the United States and offering good enough speed to receive a smooth video stream back to Norway. But, not least, the VPN service must provide servers that are not blocked by Netflix.
As most VPN services allow more of their users to surf with the same shared IP address out of the box, many hundreds in the sled, it is easy for Netflix to find out which IPs are used by VPN providers to allow foreigners access to geoblocated content. Since February last year, Netflix has hit hard on this, and as a result, very many VPN servers are banned from the streaming service. There has been a battle where VPN services are constantly adding new VPN servers they allow customers to use until Netflix detects and blocks. That is, VPN servers that currently work with Netflix are unlikely to do it in a month or two and that VPN providers who currently have no working Netflix servers can have it tomorrow.
If you want more predictability, you may want to choose a VPN provider that gives you access to a dedicated IP address, that is, an IP address that you are free to use. When you are alone about visiting Netflix from an IP address, the chance of flagging is suspicious and revealed by the streaming service, which usually only looks at traffic and the number of connections which is a VPN IP address and not.
Eight candidates
We have picked out eight different VPN services for our test. We have measured speed both to Norwegian and US servers, and between US servers. Additionally, we’ve manually checked if a VPN service has servers that give you access to US Netflix, and we have accordingly set the VPN services ability to keep you anonymous. When winners are to be awarded, we also look at price and ease of use.
A main winner , three honorable reviews and a warning
When the status is to be resolved, it is primarily security, overall functionality and price that determines who strikes with our main recommendation. It is because measured speed is generally so good that anyone with normal internet speed will experience getting almost full speed also through the VPN provider. In addition, the speed of the different VPN services can vary greatly from server to server and day by day, despite the fact that we have done many measurements. In particular, this applies to and between US servers.
Honorable reviews:
IPVanish and IVPN were the only VPN services that succeeded in bringing American Netflix series into our living room through at least one of their US servers. And with good and stable HD quality, without the need to manage with dedicated IP addresses.
A good option may be to buy monthly subscriptions on IPVanish or IVPN and pay for these until Netflix eventually blocks traffic to their servers.
Because, note that the servers of the two VPN services we got to work might like to stop working tomorrow and the VPN services we were unable to work may introduce new servers that will work for a period before they are blocked again. by Netflix.
PIA , or Private Internet Access, may also be mentioned as it is the test’s most affordable VPN service – although some of the competitors may compete for a price if you use discount coupons. At the cost of $ 40 a year, PIA delivers a good, safe and, after our goal, a stable service that will be perceived as “good enough” for many looking for a reasonable way to browse anonymously anonymously.
Warning: PureVPN
At best speed against Norwegian servers and high speed against and US servers, as well as dedicated IP address offers, PureVPN would be one of our recommendations. But, so it was not.
Because, as the only VPN service in our test, PureVPN did not manage to hide our Norwegian IP address for the various services we visited, despite the fact that both IPv6 Protection and Secure DNS were enabled in our settings. That PureVPN does not handle this most basic task, which is to protect your identity, is serious and eliminates the whole reason for using a VPN service initially.
As the service is like a silk, it does not help to buy a dedicated IP address to view, for example, American Netflix, as Netflix will quickly track you to Norway and unleash the American content. This means that our advice will be far from PureVPN.
PureVPN also logs your connections and has recently given the police access to these in one
Einar Otto Stangvik is a security analyst at VG and, among other things, known to have uncovered Norwegians who have shared online assault images through the “The Downloaders” and the revelations around the Childs Play Assault on the Dark Network. In his work to investigate shady activity, Stangvik uses VPN services, which he has a good knowledge of. We asked him the question everyone wonder: Are you really anonymous when using a VPN?
And, Stangvik is certainly safe in his case:
“No VPN service can shield you 100 percent ,” he says, completing:
– You rarely or never have any guarantee that the VPN services do not actually log data. It does not have to be a log-in, either – it means that a switch, router, firewall, VPN software or web portal somewhere logs your IP address together with a time, so correlation over time can be done. Even though many providers say they do not log in, so you never have a guarantee that they are not sitting there and provide detailed notes about when your specific user has connected, and potentially also which external services you connect to.
– Furthermore, there is usually a 1 to 1 ratio between traffic in and traffic from VPN services, so if a monitoring operator does not have access to the service itself, but link in and link, traffic correlation is not an indispensable task for to wipe out users, points out Stangvik.
False security to send all traffic through the VPN
“Many VPN systems also work by sending all Internet traffic from the machine via the VPN. That is, anything from identifying information from system services, software updates, Steam or other game clients, web pages you have session to. If you think of the VPN as a single big tunnel, you want to push all traffic through end up in a situation where you send data trying to keep anonymous while sitting there and pouring out the “name” of yours.
– In this way, isolation of the traffic you want to anonymize, for example, by just sending traffic from one browser through tunnel, is potentially safer. However, you are at risk of leaking identifiable information between sessions.
Put another way: Stangvik has so little faith in hiring VPN services can protect his activity that if he were to rent a VPN service, it would be just as trivial to stream NRK’s online TV archive on holiday.
Bring these words of wisdom as you surf through your VPN and stay away from shady activity, so even Stangvik must admit that VPNs most can at least give a small boost to safety beyond the use of your own home network as you travel on the world wide web.
